Road Trip Report

By Michael Cole On September 22, 2008 · Leave a Comment

It must be contagious.Â I’m not from here – I’ve only lived here six years, but I seem to have already caught this Shanghai snobbiness.Â Once you leave Shanghai you drop off the edge of the earth. The only good thing about going to other places in China is how good it feels to come home to Shanghai.Â People from other places all wish they could live in Shanghai.

However, after my two day jaunt to Changzhou, I’m happy to say I had some pleasant surprises about the enjoyable (if not exciting) lifestyle and the business opportunities.Â Changzhou is in a lot of ways just another medium-sized city in Jiangsu, not that different from Wuxi, Nantong or several others. And that’s a good thing. There should be more places like this.

About 1,500 of us went to Changzhou for an investment promotion event, rather grandly titled the “China (Changzhou) Forum on Science & Technology, Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation,” this forum was basically a big ad for doing business in Changzhou, and it wasn’t the worst ad I’ve ever seen.Â Of course, we went to the event to tell more people about RightSite and hand out more of our flashy die-cut namecards. (Changzhou has several industrial zones, all of which are great potential RightSite customers).

Who was there:

Foreign businesspeople — we met folks from Chicago, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and points beyond
Local businesspeople — by this we mean local to China, and this was the largest group.Â Lots of folks from Shanghai and Beijing looking for cheaper bases for manufacturing
Local government — reps from local and provincial governments were there to show face
Foreign government — we shared our table at the banquet with the trade representatives for the State of Michigan, the State of Oklahoma, the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, the Port of Huntsville, Alabama and a few other points of distinction.
Media – well, this seemed to be local media only, so I guess the guys from Reuter and Bloomberg were off covering the American financial collapse

What we found out:

Changzhou has a museum
Changzhou has a cool city plan
Changzhou is signing some huge deals with foreign manufacturers to base facilities in the city
Changzhou has a drive-thru KFC (the ultimate sign of civilisation)
Changzhou has some serious cash — free lunch at dinner at the Traders Hotel for about 500 folks was not cheap!

Anyway, since we are not doing manufacturing here at RightSite we probably won’t be moving to Changzhou anytime soon, but I was impressed by the professionalism of the forum (keeping 86 tour buses of visitors coordinated is no small task). And while the city itself didn’t seem exciting, it did seem clean, civilised and well-organised.

And it’s only 70 minutes away on the high-speed, no spitting or smoking, train. Nice!